


Drowning Lessons in Empty Pools

by thatsfinewithus (katilara)



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-31 14:30:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1032776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/thatsfinewithus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>WWII AU. Frank comes home from the war needing desperately to connect with someone. He finds brief solace in a form that's more familiar than it should be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drowning Lessons in Empty Pools

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe I never posted this to AO3. It was one of my favorite pieces from my time in bandom. There IS a character death. It's at the very beginning. It plays in reverse. This is your warning.

The men could see the fires burning in the grass on the shore. The flickering light traveled through the darkness caused by the staggered, low laying clouds, and reminded Mikey of church when he was a boy. Everyone holding their breath, everyone saying a prayer as white wax melted down long, smooth sticks. By the time the boats dropped them off on sandbars they had a clear shot of the wrecked tanks and fallen men spotting the beach. 

“The sectors have been fucked,” Gerard said. 

Mikey nodded and folded the scrap of paper he'd been scratching on while they waited. He slid it into his breast pocket and stepped down into the water, feeling it fill his shoes and soak through his pant legs. Four steps and he was off the sandbar, in the water up to his neck. Very few of the men around him spoke as they splashed through the waves. There was no need for silence, but it felt somehow sacrilegious to ruin a scene already set. Next to Mikey, Gerard held his gun at eye level, keeping it out of the caustic, freezing water. He was humming, but it wasn't a song Mikey knew. Gerard did that, made up songs when he couldn't think of anything to say. If they made it through this Mikey would learn it on his guitar, make it a hymn of life. 

They were trudging up onto the shore now and Mikey looked to his left, watching the men fan out as they made it up to the waterline. The moon broke through the clouds and illuminated the white faces under their heavy helmets. There was forty seconds of silence. Mikey kept his eyes trained on the 29th Infantry insignia on the shoulder of the man ahead of him. The blue and gray taijitu, conflicting and complimenting, dark and light. No one had ever been able to tell him which one of those they were supposed to be. The man to his right landed a foot on dry sand, the sound of men dying and crying out orders buzzed around them, and then the enemy opened fire. 

Sand exploded upwards toward the low wall of clouds from gunfire and tank mortar. Mikey couldn't listen to anything he was being told. The men had erupted into chaos, realizing their initiative had already failed, since they were much farther down the beach than they should have been. 

“Gogogogogogogo,” was the rushed, steady chant from behind him, and a pair of hands pushed him roughly forward. He couldn't move fast in his waterlogged clothing and pack, could only move at a pace slightly faster than a trudge. A man fell at his feet and it was all Mikey could do not to step on his chest. He stumbled over the body and fell to the ground, let got of his gun and pushed at the shifting sand, trying to get purchase to stand up again. Mikey cast his eyes wildly around him. 

“Mikey! Mikey!” He looked up and Gerard was leaning over him, mouth set in a grimace, eyes wide. “Mikey, get the fuck up! Are you hit?” 

Mikey gave his head an exaggerated shake and let Gerard pull him up. The two of them almost over corrected and toppled over again and Mikey let his hands scrabble to Gerard's sides to hold on. His fingers dug into the rough fabric of Gerard's jacket and he closed his eyes tight, giving himself a moment to be scared shitless. He focused on Gerard's ragged, heavy breathing at his ear, swallowed deep, and then let go. 

One foot behind him, then the other. Mikey backed away from Gerard and tried to give a reassuring smile. He bent to pick up his gun where he'd dropped it, and stood back up, fingering the trigger. The noise around him was deafening. It was impossible to be afraid of any one sound of gunfire when you could no longer distinguish it from the rest of the cacophony. Everything was so, so loud. And then everything was silent. 

Mikey tried to turn around and run up the beach, but he couldn't move. He crumpled forward, sand hitting his lips and he tried to push up and away from it, tried to spit it out as it became grit in his teeth. He felt the weight leave him as his pack was taken away from his back, his arms jarred at odd angles to get it off, and he was flipped onto his back. Gerard's face was over him and he was yelling. Mikey could tell he was yelling by the way the vein in his neck was pulled taut against his skin and the way his mouth worked wide and fast, but Mikey still couldn't hear anything. 

Gerard yanked him up, half out of the sand, and Mikey felt the strength drip out of his arms, slide away from his neck. Mikey couldn't hear, and now, pressed into Gerard's shoulder he couldn't see. Then the pain exploded through his back and down into his legs and the sound washed over him and drowned him in sensation. He choked on the words he meant to say. Then there was nothing.

*

Frank was a god damned war hero, and he had the medal of honor, frequent night terrors, and diminishing social skills to prove it. He kept every bit of that hidden when he could, though. It's what he loved most about being on stage.

He had found that when he came home from the war, people stopped listening to him. Even during the war, in the dark of night when the other men had nodded along with his words and sometimes willfully misunderstood him, he had known they were listening. Now people didn't need him anymore. He'd done his duty. 

“Iero!” Saul's gutteral voice broke through his thoughts. Frank had spent most of this current tour wondering how a man who was so guff sounded so mournful on stage. “You gettin' yer ass out here te play 'r should I find 'nother gi-tar?” Even the best actors had to draw from something. 

“Coming!” Frank toed the crumpled eviction notice he'd just dropped on the floor. His shoes stuck on the spilled beer and layers of dust, which made it hard to effectively ground the paper down. “Hold yer goddamned gunners.” 

It was a good night for them. There were a hundred and fifty pairs of eyes milling around the bar, most of them focused on Frank. He hadn't given a thought to the natural segregation of the races in his time before the war, and during he became so deep in the shit that the last thing he looked for in a man was his color. He was mostly focused on the intensity and interest in a man's eyes. The spark that told Frank this person would die for their fellow men. 

Coming home had been strange on it's own. It was worse coming home to find that he was looked down on for associating with men who had helped him in numerous ways during the war, so he just figured he'd fuck everyone and go on tour with a blues band. It was escapism, but it was also his own personal statement. Didn't mean it didn't unsettle him when even the colored people who frequented the blues bars found him to be as odd as his friends found his war buddies. But still, fuck them. He'd prove himself to these people, like he did every night, and after the set he'd have as many free drinks as he could hold. That was something that never got old. 

The strap lay heavy across his shoulder and the neck of his guitar was smooth in the palm of his hand. Not entirely unlike the butt of a rifle. He scanned the room disinterestedly as Saul began his first song. Sang out over the crowd loud enough that it silenced them almost instantly. Four bars in, like every night, Frank started playing over Saul and the drums kicked in behind him. He looked down at where his fingers were picking out the strings, dancing across lines drawn against the sand-colored body. He looked up again when the song was over, accidentally right into a pair of dark eyes set deep in white, white skin. He was caught so off guard that he stepped back onto Iggy's foot. Iggy bumped Frank's back with the body of his bass and pushed him forward again. 

Almost every person in the room was bobbing their head to the beat Kenton was beginning to kick on the drums. They clapped along with Saul. They politely looked at everything on the stage but into Frank's eyes, except the white guy with the black hair. He didn't move, didn't take his eyes off Frank's face, only leaned forward onto his table with his hand cupping his chin and reminded Frank of someone. Those eyes niggled their way into his memory and started to drive him crazy. But maybe none of it mattered. It didn't matter who the person reminded Frank of, and it didn't matter that he'd missed a count and Saul was going to ream him out later. All that really mattered was that someone was listening.

*

Gerard was sitting cross legged on his bed when Mikey made it back from the mess that evening. He bounced a blank pad of paper on his knee and nibbled at the butt of the pen that he held between his front teeth. “Mail,” Gerard said, without looking up.

Mikey smiled and wandered down the rows of bunks till he reached his. There were two letters on the pillow, their yellowed paper contrasting with the white white of over bleached army linens. The first letter was from their mother. 

“Hey,” he called down the barrack, “did she send you one too, or are we sharing this?” 

Gerard looked up, curious, and pulled the pen from his mouth, licking his lower lip. “Mom?” 

“Yeah.” Mikey turned back to the letter, slid his finger under the flap of the envelope and ran it across, ripping the paper as he went. Sometimes it was easy to pretend like all of their mail wasn't opened before hand, like no one else had read the messages meant for their eyes only. He heard Gerard shuffle up behind him and held the letter over his shoulder without reading it. Gerard pulled it out of his hand and Mikey reached to pick up the other envelope. 

He recognized the hand writing immediately and his heart jumped into his throat. He hadn't been back to that pub since his encounter with Frank, and the letter he'd sent in reply to Frank's request to see him again before his regiment was moved had been vague at best. If Frank had read between the lines though... There was no telling what this would say. Mikey opened it and scanned over the words quickly. Nothing that was too telling, but it was overall hopeful, which made Mikey sick to his stomach. He didn't realize Gerard was trying to get his attention until he felt the sharp jab in his side from Gerard's finger. 

“Hey, what's that one?” 

Mikey folded the letter quickly and shoved it into his pocket. “Nothing,” he said. “Just some guy I met at one of the dance halls. He was shipping out and wanted to know if I could get a message to his friend.”

Gerard tilted his head and Mikey knew he didn't believe the story. He also knew Gerard wouldn't push. “Well, can you tell his friend the message?” 

Mikey gave a noncommittal grunt and shrugged. “I'm not sure it's news that needs to be shared, really. Might make things harder on him.” 

Gerard nodded. “That's not for you to decide, though.” 

“No, it's not.” He kept his hands in the pocket of his pants and ran a finger lightly over the sharp edge of the paper. “What does mom have to say?”

Gerard gave him a wry smile and rolled his eyes. “Oh, you know, the same. Love you. Don't die. If you do die I'll come bring you back to life and kill you again. Mikey, take care of your glasses.” 

Mikey let out a short, dry laugh. “Right. Don't die. Got it. We should tell her that that really isn't a part of the plan.”

*

Another city, another band. It hadn't been so bad, being with Saul and his guys, but Frank had found that the person he'd become had a certain shelf life with other people, so it was better to call things off before they exploded. He pulled his hat down low and studied the ground in front of his feet as he quick stepped his way up 6th Avenue. He had a few weeks off before the proper tour. He planned to spend it studying New York, which is something he'd never done, despite growing up a stone's throw away. New York was chaotic, it was everything about the States that they had been working to protect, and it reminded him, very much, what it looked, sounded, smelled, tasted like to be alive.

“Hey, bluesman!” 

Frank almost tripped over the crack his toe caught as he tried to stop. He looked up and over his shoulder. He hadn't even realized where he was. On the corner there was a textile store, and next to that a bookstore. There were some low slung, wrought iron tables dotting the pavement outside and a man took up one of the chairs, his knees sticking out at odd angles because of the seat's proximity to the ground. He was wearing gray slacks and a black shirt, a black British uniform beret pulled low across his forehead. Frank recognized it immediately as the type of cap that the grunts sometimes exchanged with each other if they'd spent too much time together in fox holes. 

“You were in Chicago.” Frank spoke before he realized he was even thinking the words, then closed his mouth again abruptly.

“I have been, yes.” The man offered him a lopsided smile and pulled a cigarette from the pack of Marlboro's sitting next to the comic he'd laid face down on the table. The words Daredevil Battles Hitler taunted Frank. If he the man had been in the war he certainly had a sense of humor. “And you have as well. You were pretty good, by the way. I would have said so personally, but you were a little too popular for my tastes.” He lit the cigarette and took a long drag on it before waving it vaguely at the chair across from him. “What brings you here?”

Frank didn't believe in coincidences, but this one was a doozy. Instead he kept his mouth shut tight around the hundred questions he had moving through his mind. Things like 'why were you there?' 'Why are you here?' 'What regiment were you in?' He settled on, “getting ready for a tour, had some time off in New York.” 

“Not with Hot Lead, I'm guessing, since last I saw they'd moved on to St. Louis.” He let the cigarette dangle from his mouth and talked around it, which made his words sound more wry than Frank thought was intended. 

Frank looked back at him, a little bewildered. 

“Oh, sorry. I'm a music journalist. Not good enough that you'd know who I am, but not so lousy they don't send me off to check on certain movements. I'm Gerard.”

Ah, Frank thought. The man didn't offer his hand, so Frank didn't try to move forward and take it. Gerard seemed to understand about not wanting to be touched. Frank was mollified by that, at least. He worked on forcibly calming his nerves. “No, no. Different band.” 

“Same sort of thing?” Gerard's eyes darted about the space around Frank, as if they were keeping up with Frank's aura, what must have been the tumble of emotions he was emanating. They held the same intensity Frank had often used to watch the skyline for the light of falling shells in the dead of night. It made him feel tight, enclosed. Intimate was the word, though that wasn't going to say it out loud and lend the word meaning. 

“More or less.” Frank shoved his hands into the pockets of his pants and looked over Gerard's head, into the shop. The shelves against the walls were haphazardly stacked with books, magazines, and piles of dust, and there were ironworks and statues filling the small floorspace. He wondered if it smelled like old paper and sour powder. 

And then something in Frank's head clicked into place, like a locket closing tight over a precious photo to keep it secure. Gerard reminded him of that kid from the 29th. The one who, along with everything about the past, was lost. Gerard reminded him so much of the kid that he couldn't shake the feeling he was talking to a ghost. 

Gerard ashed his cigarette on the sidewalk and looked Frank square in the eye from under shaggy tendrils of black hair. “So, bluesman, you have a name?”

*

“Frank, I—” Mikey didn't know where Frank had found the apartment, or how much he'd paid to rent it. It wasn't a hotel, but a small set of nicely kept rooms near the center of London. They smelled like lilac water and the low, sharp sent of powder. They smelled like a woman lived there.

Frank pushed Mikey into the wall and pressed his knee between Mikey's legs. He had to run it up the wall some, because of the height difference, and balanced himself with his arms on Mikey's hips, pushing Mikey back. Frank was slight and compact, but he moved with purpose after four years in the army's training, and Mikey could feel every bit of his weight as it pressed up against him. Mikey felt light headed. 

“Does—. Is the person who lives here? Are they coming home any time soon?” 

Frank laughed low and breathy into Mikey's collar bone. Then he pulled Mikey's glasses off and ran his forefinger thoughtfully over the wire frames before putting them down on a side table between them and the door. “No, she's gone out. It pays to make friends with the locals.” 

Mikey nodded and watched Frank's fingers as they worked the buttons of his shirt open. “Why did you do this?”

Frank pulled back and slid his knee down the wall till he was standing on both feet again. He looked startled, and Mikey fought the urge to say he was sorry. “I like you.” 

It was such a simple statement, and not anything like Mikey had expected to hear. He didn't want to be liked. He didn't want to make friends with people who were going to die soon. People he might become attached to and then never see again. Anymore than he had to anyway. “You...like me?”

“Yeah, I thought. Well, what I thought isn't important.” Frank hooked his fingers in the waistband of Mikey's pants and jerked him forward. “You're worth more than a handjob in a fox hole, okay?” 

“Yeah, yeah.” Mikey furrowed his brow and looked down into Frank's face. Frank looked back at him with the same intense earnestness he'd been looking at him with since they'd met. He leaned up and caught Mikey's lips with his. 

Mikey didn't do things like this, in general. He didn't sneak off to fraternize with other soldiers. He didn't drink up attention from people as though there was no one else who loved him. He didn't fall for men who had blown, hazel irises and insistent hands and lips dried out from the English sun, which wasn't as much of a myth as they'd been led to believe. He leaned forward, and hummed a few low notes in the back of his throat without thinking about it.

*

It was ridiculous, Frank knew, to feel so nostalgic about a weight he wasn't familiar with. He still had to hold back a groan when Gerard pulled back and out, crawled down the bed off of him. “I'll be back,” he said, and then walked naked into the bathroom and closed the door. The shape of Gerard, the way his hips moved when he walked, the way his breath caught when you touched a particularly sensitive spot on his thigh, reminded Frank so much of the kid from before that it fucking hurt. Even so he loved every part of it, craved the touch and warmth he'd been warding off since he returned to the States. From the other side of the door Gerard started humming and Frank couldn't help but allow himself a smug smile. It was a tune he'd heard before. He couldn't quite place it.

He hadn't meant to fuck the guy, he'd just liked talking to him. Turned out they'd been so close to each other in England that it was a wonder they hadn't met during the war. Even down to having frequented the same pubs in their off time, and both having been made to storm some crappy beach in France and barely get away without being slaughtered. They didn't talk about the war much though, and they certainly didn't talk about the people they'd known. There was no sense in rubbing salt in those particular wounds. But in dancing around the real subjects at hand they'd sort of worked their way to a stalemate that Gerard had broken. Frank rolled over and pushed his face into the pillow, smelling Gerard's shampoo and his own sweat. He'd never liked stalemates. 

After a moment he sat up and looked around the room, trying to find something to clean off with. There was a box of tissue on the dresser. Frank slowly pushed his way out of bed, feeling the strain on his lower body from what they'd just done. He gingerly made his way to the dresser and began wiping off his stomach and around to his cock and anus. Two men together was really fucking gross, if you got down to it, but it was one of the things Frank liked about it. He'd always been attracted to messes. 

He finished up and looked around. There were some bits of paper and photographs stuck into the side of the mirror. Frank let his eyes drift over a photo of two small boys and the scraps in their varying states of yellow with their sometimes unidentifiable scrawl. Then his eyes fell on scrawl he knew. His heart caught in his throat. Even with almost every one of his muscles was burning, he failed to stave off a shiver. It was written in shitty pen on a torn scrap of paper. The words were smudged and water bloated. 

_F -_

_I wasn't unsure about you, I was just caught off guard. Everyone here has his own motive, I don't want you to have to second guess mine. I didn't come here to find anyone, myself included, and I've spent a good part of the time losing as much as I could. Myself, time, relationships, memories. The shit isn't the place to reflect. But right now I'm watching the fires burn on a beach I've never been to and would pay anything to never step foot on and I can't help it. Gerard would laugh at me. Call me maudlin, tell me he was wearing off on me. You'd probably like Gerard, he's my brother. I don't know if I'd ever told you about having a brother. But there._

_The thing I've come to realize, maybe in the last day or so, is that running, pretending, putting off the future and truth, don't stop anything. Time still marches forward without us, so we can't stop. Don't stop, okay? I'm not saying we're anything more than what we are, but circumstances change._

_I like you too._

_If we make it through this night, the next beer is on you._

_\-- M_

Frank reached his hand out and stroked the brittle, creased paper with his forefinger. The kid hadn't forgotten him. The kid had been listening. And he had—

Falling backward, Frank almost missed the side of the bed, his hip just hitting it so that he could catch his weight with his elbow. It was fucking impossible. It was. 

He grabbed his trousers from the floor at the foot of the bed and struggled into them as quickly as he could manage. He clawed at the fabric of his shirt when it caught on his head. Suffocating, suffocating, he snatched the paper out of the mirror frame. It tore and left behind one frayed edge. Frank crumpled it and shoved it down into his pocket. 

Frank took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He stood in the middle of the small bedroom and listened to the sound of running water, a million memories flooded back with the gush. Sweat and mud and gunshot wounds and blood and beer and gentle touches and rough kicks. The water stopped. 

He turned toward the door and did what Mikey had wanted him to do all along. One foot in front of the other. He moved forward.

*

“Too ra loo, too ra loo, they're looking for monkeys up at the zoo!”

Mikey inhaled deeply and the smoke that hung in the air around him burned his lungs like the acrid smell of artillery rounds, but he couldn't complain. There were at least twenty men singing the song in unison, British and American soldiers alike. They waved their pints around and sloshed beer on the bar top and the chairs and the clothes of the men around them, spoiling both duty uniforms and civilian dress. 

“If I had a face like you I would join the British army!” 

Men not singing hooted and howled at the lyric, but then turned back to their conversations. Around Mikey there were arms thrown over shoulders, faces made ruddy by alcohol and pent up tension being pressed into the necks of strangers. There were at least a hundred men in the bar, which reminded him that there were at least hundred men or more dead just that day. Every man that night drank one for someone they knew, someone they wouldn't ever meet, someone's girl back home. Then they drank one more for the road, to push away the memory of just how close a watch Death kept on them. The minute they let Death know they knew it was there, it was all over. There was no holding it back. 

Mikey stumbled over the words he'd just learned and lost the beat. He gave up and laughed his way through the next verse, drank his way into the next. If singing would end the war he'd sing every word he knew for eternity. As it was, singing just made him hoarse the next day, made Gerard shake his head at the goofy grin on Mikey's face when he made it back to the barracks long after curfew. 

He signaled to the tender for another beer and by the time he got it the singing had moved to the corner of the room. He wanted to follow it. He slid off his stool, miscalculating the distance to the floor and tripped sideways. A pair of hands clasped onto his upper arm, steadying him. When Mikey turned he saw that the man was in his service greens and that the patch on his shoulder was bearing the big red one. 

“Oh, the First is here. I'm in good hands then,” he said, and gave a lopsided grin. 

The man was shorter than Mikey, but his eyes were clear despite the atmosphere in the room, and there was an intensity in them that made Mikey suddenly very glad that neither of them had a weapon. Mikey wasn't sure the man couldn't just kill him by merit of staring at him hard enough, but the look was gone as quickly as Mikey had noticed it and the man let go. He took a step back and extended his hand. It was warm and dry in Mikey's, which was moist still from the condensation on his glass.

“Frank Iero,” the man said. 

Mikey wanted to give his name in return, but he was drunk and giddy and he felt like his voice didn't have the authority. He felt like even if he told the truth it would come out lazy and unsteady like a lie. 

“I, I am going to buy you a drink,” was the safest thing Mikey could think of to say. The man, Frank, nodded and stepped closer to Mikey, his elbow pressed into Mikey's side as they leaned over the bar top. If that turned out to be a lie, well then, there had been nothing at stake.


End file.
